A study carried out by scientists from the University of Granada (UGR) has revealed that women who experience stress both before becoming pregnant and during conception are almost twice as likely to have a girl as a boy.
Researchers, belonging to the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC), the Pharmacology department of the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Psychology, have analyzed the levels of cortisol (a steroid hormone that is released in response to stress) in the hair of pregnant women in the period from before conception to week 9 of pregnancy, to check if it was related to the sex of the baby.
To do this, 108 women were evaluated from the first weeks of pregnancy to delivery, recording their stress levels before, during and after conception through the concentration of cortisol in hair and different psychological tests.
The measurement of cortisol in hair taken approximately in week 8-10 of pregnancy shows the concentration of cortisol in the pregnant woman in the last three months (one month per centimeter of hair), therefore it includes the period before and after the pregnancy. conception. Subsequently, the UGR scientists recorded different variables of delivery and the sex of the baby at birth.
“The results found were surprising, since they showed that women who gave birth to girls showed in the weeks before, during and after the moment of conception higher concentrations of cortisol in their hair than those who had boys”, explains the main author of This work, the researcher of the Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment of the UGR María Isabel Peralta Ramírez.
Furthermore, these cortisol concentrations in the hair of mothers who subsequently had girls were almost double that of mothers who had boys.
Photo the Jonathan Borba and Pexels
In Babies and more | Stress During Pregnancy Could Influence Your Baby’s Brain Development
